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PVM Version 3.4.6 is Available on Netlib
2 February 2009
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The latest PVM release 3.4.6 is mainly bug fixes and additional
support for varying Linux distributions and gcc updates, and of
course yet-more-better-64-bit support. While there's a variety
of other little tweaks, there are no significant changes or
additions to the basic functionality.
Some specifics:
* The biggest thing has probably been plugging up various holes
relating to file security, at the behest of several concerned
users - there are no more fopen()'s for writing/appending
temporary files in PVM, it's all popen() or open()'s with O_EXCL
now, to protect you and yours. :-)
* An updated version of the BEOLIN architecture port has been
included, straight from Paul Springer .
* Fixed long-standing console output error.
* Added check to prevent users running PVM as "root" - just
not a good idea... :-)
* Header Files: Fixed annoyingly omitted "pvmtev.h" header #includes
that caused "global.h" usage to raise compiler warnings... :-b
Also added some now-standard system headers, like and
, where appropriate... Added some #includes
(or depending on your flavor :-) .
* Added support for building "shared" libraries for PVM...! Yay! :-D
Just run "make shared" at the top level directory (pvm3/).
Also, see the SHAREDCFLAGS and SHAREDLDFLAGS definitions,
e.g. in pvm3/conf/LINUX.def, for customizing shared library
build settings for other architectures.
* Fixed typos/formatting in man pages. That was fun. :)
* Added new pvm_strerror() function, submitted by Frank Sonntag
. Fixed other goofy strerror() crap.
* Added new HPIA64 arch, submitted by Max Zinal .
Anyway, it was just time to stop patching (+10!) and do a
real release... So here it is...! :-D
As Always, Enjoy...! :D
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PVM Version 3.4.5 is Available on Netlib
8 September 2004
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The latest PVM release 3.4.5 is mainly bug fixes and additional
support for varying Linux distributions and some better 64-bit
Linux/AMD support (like it doesn't seg fault any more :-) .
Added strerror() support instead of old crusty global vars.
New architectures were added for AIX5*. Fixed hilarious bug
in pvmtmpnam(), caused crash after 10,000 spawns... :-D
While there's a variety of little tweaks, there are no significant
changes or additions to the basic functionality.
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PVM Version 3.4.4 is Available on Netlib
28 September 2001
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are many bug fixes and a couple new features included in the
Version 3.4.4 release. Most of these are not significant, unless
you are running on some of the less common architectures which may
now be supported! :-)
* One new feature in PVM 3.4.4 is the concept of a "Virtual Machine ID".
You can now set the PVM_VMID environment variable to an arbitrary
string (or use the "id=" option in a host file), and this will
distinguish multiple virtual machines all running on the same set
of hosts under the same userid. (This feature was originally
introduced by SGI in their commercial PVM product, and has now been
generalized for the public PVM system.) This feature seems to be
something that people often want, and the PVM_VMID seems to be the
cleanest way to provide this functionality, rather than overloading
the SHAREDTMP and other internals.
* Linux / gcc fixes: got rid of many invasive new compiler
warnings, like "tmpnam() is dangerous" and some old
crusty varargs code.
* Added some new archs, like DARWIN & MACOSX for Macs (huhuhuhuh),
CYGWIN, and BEOSCYLD, and updated some arches like FreeBSD systems.
* Extended the syntax of the "where" argument in pvm_spawn()
to include a working directory, as in "foo.org:/home/joe".
* Fixed direct routing bug that could result in deadlock,
also fixed (?) direct routing in WIN32.
* Fixed bug to appropriately set message context around message
handler invocations.
* Added use of new strerror() function in place of direct use of
sys_errlist/sys_nerr, for systems that don't grok that.
* Minor WIN32 tweaks and bug fixes...
Please see the notes in the "pvm_intro" and "pvmd3" man pages for more
details. Several other new environment variables are also documented
there.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PVM Version 3.4.0 is Available on Netlib
12 March 1999
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Besides bug fixes to 3.3, there are many new features in Version 3.4
(see man pages for more details):
-------- Message Context --------
* To allow more flexibility in organizing message tags sets, and
to provide support for "safe" libraries that will not inadvertently
intercept user messages, the concept of "message context" in PVM
has been introduced. The context is an additional system-defined
message tag that each message carries, such that each given message
can only be sent or received within a single unique context. For
example, all internal system messages in PVM now utilize a different
context than the base user application context, so that system
messages cannot be incorrectly received by the application. The
user can determine the current context, create a new context,
set the current context and free message contexts using the new
routines pvm_getcontext(), pvm_newcontext(), pvm_setcontext() and
pvm_freecontext(), respectively (see man pages for details). The
context itself is an integer value which can be packed into messages
and sent to cooperating tasks, or placed in a message mailbox (see
below) for client-service lookup. By default, all tasks are spawned
in the same base context.
-------- Message Handlers --------
* In the spirit of Active Messages, PVM now supports "message handlers"
for automatic processing of incoming messages. The user can define
any number of message handler functions, each with a corresponding
(source, tag, context) tuple. Then when a message matching a
particular tuple arrives at the local task, the user-specified
handler routine is automatically invoked to process the message.
Within a message handler, the message can be unpacked and a simple
response message can be packed and sent (using pvm_send() only).
The new PVM routines for creating and deleting message handlers are
pvm_addmhf() and pvm_delmhf(), respectively (see man pages for
details). Note that message handlers are only invoked when the
application is already executing a PVM messaging routine - handlers
cannot interrupt normal program execution. Typically, message
handlers will trigger transparently during other communication,
but the user can specifically invoke them by calling pvm_probe()
or an equivalent function in a loop.
-------- Message Mailboxes --------
* To provide a new means for name service that does not require the
PVM dynamic group server ("pvmgs"), a "message mailbox" mechanism
has been added to PVM 3.4. Using this feature a user application
can post a message to a public mailbox which can subsequently be
"looked up" and retrieved by other independently spawned tasks in
the virtual machine. Each mailbox is created using a specific
"class name" and can consist of either exactly one or many entries
for that given name. When a task "looks up" a mailbox entry, it
receives back the message contained in it, to be unpacked and
processed as desired. Mailboxes can be mutually exclusive, to
act as a locking mechanism for resources, and can be created as
"persistent" so that they will continue to exist after the owner
(or creator) task exits. The new routines in PVM for creating,
retrieving and freeing message mailboxes are pvm_putinfo(),
pvm_recvinfo() and pvm_delinfo(), respectively, plus an additional
routine, pvm_getmboxinfo(), for obtaining a list of the currently-
defined class names (see man pages for details).
-------- Spawn Siblings --------
* Often when designing SPMD programs, it is useful to know which tasks
were spawned together as a group. This information can be used to
form static groups for efficient group communication, or simply for
referencing other members of your own "spawn siblings". The new
PVM call pvm_siblings() (see man page for details) returns a list
of integer task ids that corresponds to all the tasks that were
spawned together from a single pvm_spawn() call (or from the "pvm"
console).
-------- Tracing --------
* Routines in libpvm and the group library have included built-in
tracing of calling parameter/results since PVM 3.3. In PVM 3.4,
the tracing facility has been completely rewritten to be more
general, flexible and maintainable. As a result, the tracing
capabilities of PVM 3.4 have been expanded to support trace
buffering, several levels of tracing, and user-defined trace
events. The graphical PVM interface, XPVM 1.2, has been rewritten
to use a new PVM library, libpvmtrc, and a new text-based trace
collection tool ("tracer") has been added to the standard PVM
distribution to allow easy trace file collection on systems where
X11 compilation is either difficult or impossible. In addition,
the new tracing facility now supports "automatic" attachment to
trace collection programs, so that when tasks are independently
spawned, e.g. from the shell, their trace events will still
propagate to the proper trace tool (without any manual "attachment"
procedure). Other various improvements have been applied to
specific trace events, e.g. pvm_send() events now carry the message
size information, allowing proper driving of XPVM's Message
Queue View (you will notice the difference in the message coloring
to indicate this added capability). Upon re-compiling XPVM with
the new PVM 3.4 libraries (by clearing the defines for PVMVERSION
and PVMGLIB, and modifying TRCDIR to point to pvm3/tracer in the
file "xpvm/src/Makefile.aimk"), you will find additional options
on the "Tasks.../SPAWN" dialog to control the new tracing features.
The new "pvm" console also supports new options to the "trace"
commands (type "help trace" in the console for a description).
For additional information regarding use of the more advanced
tracing features, send email to "kohlja@ornl.gov".
* Added new "trcsort" program (in pvm3/tracer subdirectory) for
sorting trace files by timestamp. Takes into account approximate
clock skew among hosts (still no guarantees about "tachyons" though).
-------- Misc --------
* Most of the MIMD and SHMEM code has been completely rewritten
(as of this beta release, the SHMEM ports are still work in progress)
to eliminate many bugs and improve maintainability and robustness.
On architectures that support shared memory operations, the
default PVM architecture selection is now non-shmem, and to turn
on selection of the appropriate *MP architecture the user must
set the environment variable "PVM_SHMEM" to "ON", as in
"setenv PVM_SHMEM ON" (see "Potential Incompatibilities" below).
The style of compiling PVM applications for MPP systems has
also changed slightly - please refer to the pvm3/examples directory
for the proper Makefile.aimk targets.
* The Makefiles for PVM 3.4 have been completely overhauled to
(theoretically) allow easier setting of desired compile options
from the new top level Makefile.aimk. The new defines "CFLOPTS" and
"FFLOPTS" are passed down into the various subdirectories and then
prepended to the definitions for CFLAGS and FFLAGS, respectively.
Likewise, setting CC or F77 at the top level will force that setting
throughout the source tree when making at the top level.
* Extensive work has been done on the PVM port to Windows systems,
the "WIN32" architecture. The stuff really works now! :-)
* Added new "srm" simple resource manager example, in pvm3/rm.
* Added new pvm_setopt() option "PvmNoReset" for system tasks, to
prevent tasks from being killed during a system reset.
* Added new pvm_setopt() option "PvmNoSpawnParent" so that tasks can
now use pvm_parent() to determine if they are the "master" in
master-slave applications, even if tasks are spawned from the
"pvm" console or XPVM.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bug Fixes:
* Remote task output collection and tracing is now correctly working
on MPP systems such as PGON and SHMEM architectures.
* It is now possible to fully interoperate pvm_send(), pvm_recv(),
pvm_nrecv() and pvm_trecv() with pvm_psend() and pvm_precv()
(assuming that the appropriate PvmDataRaw data encoding is used!).
MPPs can use pvm_psend() and pvm_precv() off-machine with tasks
that are using the traditional send and receive routines.
* Modified pvm_freebuf() so that freeing a NULL buffer no longer
generates an error. Many 3.3 codes exhibited this error through
the use of pvm_freebuf( pvm_setsbuf(x) ) where there was no old
send buffer.
* A static character variable has been utilized inside pvm_version()
to prevent stack problems on certain architectures.
* Cleaned up LINUX defines for latest Linux kernel header files,
no longer yaks on "struct fd_set rfds" everywhere.
* Removed ancient "-lmutex" from SGI architectures ARCHDLIB defines!
* Lots of manual pages additions and fixes (more to come...).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Changes - Potential Incompatibilities:
* The old "$SGIMP" environment variable has been subsumed with the
new "$PVM_SHMEM" environment variable.
* Due to incompatibilities between AIX 4.1 and 4.2, the previous RS6K
architecture has been split to add several new architectures for
different OS / SHMEM combinations: AIX46K, AIX4MP, AIX4SP2.
* All of the various daemon-to-task and task-to-task protocols have
been moved to a new public header file, "pvm3/include/pvmproto.h".
The constants for utilizing the protocols for task control messages
and other system support programs are all included in this new header
file.
* Tracing facility has been completely rewritten, new trace messages
are incompatible with PVM 3.3 tracing tools (except XPVM 1.2, see
above). However, the new libpvmtrc.a tracing library is provided
for collecting and manipulating PVM trace files. See the "tracer"
example for details.
* Defunct functs - the following functions are no longer supported
in PVM 3.4: pvm_insert(), pvm_delete(), pvm_lookup(). The name
service features that these routines provided are now handled
using the message mailbox system. For backwards compatibility,
these functions have been implemented on top of the mailbox
system, but pvm_insert(), pvm_delete(), pvm_lookup() are obsolete
and should not be used.
* Obsolete functions - the following functions will be eliminated
in a future release: pvm_getmwid(), pvm_setmwid(). Users should
switch to pvm_getminfo() and pvm_setminfo().
------------------------------------------------------------------------
How to get it:
It's just been put on netlib2.CS.UTK.EDU and will propagate to the
other servers soon.
From Netlib, to get a uuencoded, compressed tarfile:
echo "send pvm3.3.tar.z.uu from pvm3" | mail netlib@ORNL.GOV
For more information from Netlib about PVM:
echo "send index from pvm3" | mail netlib@ORNL.GOV
Using Xnetlib:
select directory pvm3, file pvm3.3.tar.z.uu
Via FTP:
host netlib2.CS.UTK.EDU, login anonymous, directory /pvm3
For more information about file retrieval from netlib:
finger anon@netlib2.CS.UTK.EDU
Send bug reports, comments, questions to:
pvm@MSR.EPM.ORNL.GOV
Use newsgroup for discussion:
comp.parallel.pvm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sincerely,
The PVM research group